Nancy Carey was sitting on the arm of her father’s old office chair, one plump, pale hand on his white head. “And I don’t want to have you kill yourself,” she added softly.
“Of course you don’t!” The old gentleman beamed, putting his arm about her. “Don’t want to see your old Daddy’s one and only right-hand man killed off, so he’ll have to work himself to death, do you? No, of course you don’t!” The light died out of his face and he sighed. “Well, I’ll be getting along home, Lady-bird! Old Doc’s right ... a little goes a long way with me now. But next week, Luke, I reckon I’ll be back on the job!”
The next week found him only slightly stronger, however, and Nancy, tyrannizing prettily over him, brought him down for only an hour a day, and presently his physician ordered him into the Canadian Rockies for two months.
Glen, who had secretly hoped that Luke’s promotion would mean an upward step for her as well, kept her disappointment to herself. Of course, it didn’t matter, really; she wanted to be wherever she could help Luke most, but there would have been great pride and satisfaction in keeping the books of the Altonia. She knew she could do it acceptably; she had taken high marks in bookkeeping at business college. It hurt a little, to have Luke doubt her ability, although he put it very pleasantly.
“I want to keep the reins in my own hands, Glen. If you’ll just keep on with the correspondence and the files, and the thousand and one things I depend on you for—that’ll be the greatest help in the world!”
Luke had been a little difficult, at first, when she had explained the way in which she cared for him, with its prohibitions and limitations; she had been rather frightened, for a moment, but almost instantly he had himself in hand again. She supposed it was disappointing, if you were a demonstrative sort of person, to find some one you cared for was not demonstrative, although it couldn’t, she felt sure, be as uncomfortable as the other way about! Luke had a theory which she had no means of weighing and judging, that, directly they were married, she would get over her foolish notions. Girls, he stated sapiently, often had ideas like that.
Glen did not doubt his being right in this matter; Luke was always right. It would have been, nevertheless, a comfort to secure the expert opinion of a woman, some woman who had been successfully loved and married, which qualification, of course, eliminated Miss Ada, even if Glen had been willing to confide in her about her mountaineer. There was nothing for it, then, but time. Time, she knew, would help her to correct her own peculiarities, and time would likewise, she earnestly hoped, so increase Luke’s interests that he would hardly miss or notice the limitations of his wife. Extremely busy and purposeful married people, such as she and Luke would be, could not, surely, have very much time left over for the sort of scenes which he had started in the lonely lane, on the afternoon of her nineteenth birthday. She visualized a serene and industrious future for them, filled to the brim with welfare work among Luke’s people and the mill hands, with economic triumphs and a new and model Altonia built on the mistakes of the old.
And meanwhile, her loyalty to Luke was doubled; if she was failing him in one way, she would make it up to him in others!
But there seemed to be margins of time, now, left over from her work, with Luke putting in almost every evening at the mill, and staying often on Sundays, and Glen found herself groping for a fresh interest.
It was Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver who supplied the inspiration for it—fair exchange for the fairy-tale book which was faithfully remembered even on that shadowed day which found Glen nineteen years and one day old.